[Bill Davis]"Time to switch to an all LED studio light strategy to balance out the energy profile!"

It not that bad given the performance. Lots of high-end gaming PCs with multiple GPUS draw a lot more power and some people use three gpus. Some of the newer mainboards I am checking out for a server built have 7 PCIe slots, all 16 lanes (which has been unheard of pre i7). Perfect for a great server built.

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"THAT'S our fail-safe point. Up until here, we still have enough track to stop the locomotive before it plunges into the ravine... But after this windmill it's the future or bust."

It is interesting that they doubled the GPU but with only a 50% increase in power. Yes 300 W is a lot but in an environment where RT performance matters, the computer will not be running all night rendering.

What matters is overall efficiency and actual power consumption. Many facilities have beer fridges that draw more power.

This is the dilemma - stay Mac and always be relegated to sub-standard graphics cards, especially those from ATI. Or go Windows with CS6 and be able to use these incredible cards. The added benefit with Premiere and Mercury is because so much work can be off-loaded to graphics card there is not the constant need to upgrade workstations - just swap out graphics cards once a year and your good!

The card is Pcie3. That's the big deal. Twice the processing power of Pcie2. So at half the voltage it will equal a pcie2 card, or in x8 slot it will perform the same as a Pcie2 in a 16x slot. See what that means? It will not matter the slots multiplier, you will not have to worry what slots are open. I don't think anything can saturate a Pcie2 bus except for uncompressed footage. So put the raid on the x16 slot and the video card on a x8.

Uncompressed 10-bit 1080i29.97 is about 250 MB/sec, or half of one lane of PCIe 2.0. A 4x PCIe 2.0 slot would be saturated with 8 streams. The highest end GPUs can push past the bandwidth limits of PCIe 2.0 8x under load, but most GPUs do not. Putting lesser GPU cards in a 16x slot is for power requirements as much as it is for bandwidth.

[Erik Mickelson]"So put the raid on the x16 slot and the video card on a x8."

You'd need some seriously fast storage to pull more than a PCIe 2.0 8x slot can support, not to mention an HBA with more than 8 lanes (and I'm not aware of any PCIe 2.0 16x HBAs).

Someday soon we'll surely find ways to need all the bandwidth available in PCIe 3.0 16x and 8x slots (expansion chassis is the obvious application), but today, single cards of any sort will struggle to fill those pipes. That's a great problem to have. In a couple years, when we have 12 Gbps SAS3, we'll be glad to have PCIe 3.0 slots to saturate.

[Lance Bachelder]"This is the dilemma - stay Mac and always be relegated to sub-standard graphics cards, especially those from ATI. Or go Windows with CS6 and be able to use these incredible cards."

Honestly, if you are shifting to Adobe, unless you need ProRes encoding, or want to run Smoke (as it stands), or have some other OS X exclusive requirement, I can't see any good reason today to stick with OS X. I have my own bias for OS X, but I'm also not an editor. I have my own personal hangups with Windows, but if you are buying a workstation, it is hard to justify a Mac for Adobe CS6 under the current circumstances.

Maybe Apple will surprise us with a worthy successor to the Mac Pro this sumer, and maybe Intel and Microsoft's shift to EFI will prompt NVIDIA and AMD to ship more Mac-friendly GPUs, but today those things aren't true.

Like I said, I'm a big-time Mac bigot, but even I can't justify choosing OS X and the currently available Mac hardware for running Adobe CS6.

Yes, it is a weird time to be a pro mac user. Since Premiere Pro CS 5.5 I have looking longingly at a custom built system from Puget Systems and this GTX 690 makes it seem like an even better solution.

I would love to see a speed comparison for CUDA on the GTX 690 vs the Tesla 2070 with Premiere Pro CS6. I know the TESLA still wins in memory so would likely blow the GTX out of the water, but I wonder about 448 CUDA cores to over 3000!

The thing is I still love Mac, and will probably want one for my regular computing even if I end up with a Windows Workstation as my editing and graphics station, which is of course another expense, but unless Mac does something surprising and makes and awesome new workstation with support for new NVIDIA CUDA cards I think a PC is likely in my future.